NS leader on a scandal that goes right to the heart of the Brown government

In our last issue we were blunt: “Politics must renew; Labour must renew; Mr Brown must renew.” One week on, and – far from renewing – the sense of drift has heightened beyond imagination. It would be convenient for No 10 if we were all to chuckle wryly at the Damian McBride affair, put it all down to an overzealous one-off cock-up, forget about a sacked McBride, and move on. Convenient, but wrong. The blogging smears scandal, and how it was handled, tell us something important about the way in which government is conducted under Gordon Brown. He yearns to be a prime minister of moral authority, a consensual figure somehow above the fray of ordinary politics, but too often comes across as a man addicted to the dark arts – spin, malign briefings, the smear.

First, it should be noted that this

was a truly Brownite scandal. Previous embarrassments for the government have been blamed all too easily on Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, and their obsession with news cycles and narratives. It was perhaps a legitimate criticism: allowing spin doctors’ arts honed in opposition to dictate behaviour in government.

But Mr McBride is truly a creature of Gordon Brown. Mr Brown promoted him. Mr Brown ignored cabinet pleas to dump him. If Mr Brown did not know what

Mr McBride was up to, he should have done. He certainly knew – and encouraged – the sort of person he had appointed. Any fool (and the Prime Minister is no fool) could have figured out what Mr McBride was likely to do.

It is not as if this was Mr McBride’s

first effort at dripping poison. His targets were anyone who threatened his master, even rivals on Labour’s own side. When, last year, rumours were circulated in

an attempt to cut down David Miliband’s leadership ambitions, suggesting that

the Foreign Secretary was “disloyal and self-serving” and lacked “judgement

and maturity”, it was widely reported that Mr McBride was behind the stories. Mr McBride was certainly loyal, but his loyalty was to person, not party, and in plying his tricks he damaged both.

Mr Brown’s response to the internet smears story was also a familiar reaction to adversity: blame the rulebook. In writing to the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, to ask for a tightening of the special advisers’ code of conduct, the Prime Minister implied that it was only the vague wording of the civil service rules for political aides that prompted McBride’s aberrant behaviour. Nonsense. The code is quite clear already. It is eerily reminiscent of the government’s response to the MPs’ expenses scandals, which tried to paint the rules as the villain, rather than a bunch of MPs on the make who seemed utterly devoid of moral scruples.

The internet, too, has come in for criticism. All those Tory blogs, we hear. Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale. Somehow we must counter their nosy and pervasive culture, and if that means dipping a civil service toe in the gossip game, too, so be it. The left must resist this approach. Nasty as they can be, the Tory political blogs serve a useful function in a democracy, especially one with such a weak opposition. If discredited former Labour aides such as Derek Draper also want to play the game on Labour’s behalf, well and good, but that is absolutely no reason for the Prime Minister’s Office to help him.

Perhaps most importantly, the McBride affair will cramp Mr Brown’s room for action. Every initiative, every movement, will be analysed and cynically interpreted as a stunt or wheeze, cooked up by No 10 to wrest back the all-important news cycle. Furthermore, any deconstruction

of the Tory policy agenda will be all the harder. As to legitimate ad hominem attacks on the Bullingdon Club background of David Cameron and George Osborne, these will now be ignored. One of the many pitiful elements of the “Red Rag” smears is the complete lack of any theme.

Just recently, before the McBride imbroglio, Mr Brown gave an interview to David Frost on al-Jazeera English. Asked about Barack Obama’s hopes for a nuclear-free world, he seemed ready to put Britain’s expensive and pointless upgrade to Trident on the non-proliferation negotiating table: “If we are to persuade countries like Iran, like Korea, but right round the Arab world not to proliferate nuclear weapons then we have got to make an initiative: one, to offer civil nuclear power and two, to be prepared to reduce our own nuclear weapons.”

The story was buried in the McBride firestorm. If he were to repeat those words now, Mr Brown would be accused of trying to divert attention. Rather, the temptation will be to circle the few remaining wagons and keep mum. That would be a tragedy.

Harold Wilson once said the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. And John Biffen said of Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press officer, that

he was the “sewer, not the sewerage”. For 20 years, Mr Brown has relied on odious figures to enforce the darker side of his political agenda. He now has one year, at best, to rid himself of the dark side and let his politics speak for themselves.

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